The operating parameters of various devices must be monitored in many situations in order to maintain the operating parameters and enable proper functionality of the devices. As a general example, a device may operate on or produce various voltages, and those voltages must remain within an acceptable range for the electrical device to function properly. Often, the devices to monitor are numerous and/or are located remotely from the technician. Thus, adequately monitoring the operating parameters of numerous or remote devices can be difficult.
In one particular example, a device may be installed in a computer to monitor the operability of the computer. However, the device itself must operate on a voltage supply that lies within a certain range such as an output of a battery or the voltage supply of an interface of the computer. Therefore, the supply voltage used by the device monitoring the computer must also be monitored to maintain the device's ability to continue monitoring the functionality of the server.
Devices such as those used to monitor a server may be equipped with a web server application interfaced to a network. The network connection for the web server application allows the device to post operating parameters to an electronic information page at a particular network location accessible by computers linked to the network. For example, the web server interface allows a device to post a static hypertext markup language (“HTML”) based web page that contains operating parameters and that has a particular uniform resource location (“URL”) address on the network. Therefore, a computer linked to the network can access the electronic information page at the network location to obtain or set parameters for the device merely by interacting with the page.
To access the electronic information page of the device, a computer must know the appropriate location of the electronic information page. Furthermore, to find a specific piece of information within the electronic information page, the computer must know the pointer within the electronic information page to the operating data that is to be obtained from or set for the device. With each device possibly having several different operating data entries to monitor and with multiple devices to be monitored, the computer and/or the technician operating it must have access to a significant amount of information to correctly interact with the electronic information page. Furthermore, as new or pre-existing devices are added to the set of devices to monitor, the information the computer needs to locate the devices must be updated to enable connection to the electronic information pages of the added devices. These issues make it difficult for the technician using the computer to effectively interact with the electronic information pages for the devices being monitored.